Spinoza’s line of argument here is thus aimed at defending the consoling thought that reason will tend to win out, rather than at providing a technique we can apply to help reason win out. Nevertheless Spinoza’s presentation of these claims suggests that he takes them to be desirable ways of living, because they derive from “strength of character, that is, [from] tenacity and nobility” (E4p73), the primary virtues. Each Attribute, however, expresses itself in its finite modes not immediately (or directly) but mediately (or indirectly), at least in the sense to be explained now. The truth is that he raised Nature to the rank of God by conceiving Nature as the fulness of reality, as the One and All. Yet Spinoza thinks the moral realist’s story is exactly backwards: “we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it” (E3p9s; cf.

In this way, we will naturally tend over time toward rational affects and away from irrational ones. Locke, Hume, Leibniz and Kant all stand accused by later scholars of indulging in periods of closeted Spinozism. Twice in Part IV, Preface ( Deum seu Naturam, Deus seu Natura); twice in Part IV, Proposition IV, Proof ( Dei sive Naturæ, Dei seu Naturæ). The moral realist, as Spinoza sees it, holds that in cases of moral judgment, we first recognize something to be good (for example), and then this results in our forming a desire for that thing.

Schopenhauer, who detested these three philosophers to varying degrees of intensity, [39] also had a similarly ambivalent relation to the Dutch philosopher.

The cosmic system is certainly a logical or rational system, according to Spinoza, for Thought is a constitutive part of it; but it is not merely a logical system — it is dynamic as well as logical. Although virtue is founded in rational self-interest, rational self-interest in turn urges us to desire the good of others. This change of description was not intended to deny that Extension and Thought are substances in the sense of being self-existent, etc. Spinoza’s alternative approach was to stick to the most general definition: a substance is something that is “in itself and is conceived through itself, that is, that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed” (E1d3).Spinoza’s description of the free man’s way of living is based upon his account of virtues: if a character trait is grounded in our reason and our pursuit of understanding, it is a virtue; if it is grounded in our passions or ignorance, it is a vice. Spinoza, in numerous passages in the Ethics and earlier works, denies that there are any such moral qualities. He thus subscribes to a desire-satisfaction theory of value: what is ultimately of value is the satisfaction of desire; things become valuable only by virtue of their being desired, or their serving to satisfy some desire. to possess something which is encouraged by the memory of that thing while concurrently restrained by the memory of other things which exclude the existence of the thing wanted. He also endorsed a version of ethical egoism, according to which everyone ought to seek their own advantage; and, just as it did for Thomas Hobbes, this in turn led him to develop a version of contractarianism.

The topics mentioned so far can be related comfortably to twenty-first century debates in moral philosophy. The object of such an affect is “necessarily related to the common properties of things” (E5p7d), which are pervasive features of reality, such as the property of being extended. So, for instance, he could not understand the reality of material objects and physical events without assuming the reality of a self-existing, infinite and eternal physical force which expresses itself in all the movements and changes which occur, as we say, in space.Instead of Nature, on the one hand, and a supernatural God, on the other, he posited one world of reality, at once Nature and God, and leaving no room for the supernatural. Since God had to exist with the nature he has, nothing that has happened could have been avoided, and if God has fixed a particular fate for a particular mode, there is no escaping it. For example, we want to be able to make sense of the fact that although someone wants to commit suicide, this is not really desirable; the moral realist’s picture gives us a way to do this by distinguishing the (true) claim that this person desires to commit suicide from the (false) claim that it is good/desirable for this person to commit suicide. Many passages in the Ethics make it appear that Spinoza simply thinks that what is best for each of us is the continuation of our lives. This appetite…is the very essence of man, from whose nature there necessarily follow those things that promote his preservation” (E3p9s).

That is, the passion of love is a composite idea, and its parts are (i) joy, and (ii) the representation of something external as producing that joy. In this interpretation, premise (1) is Spinoza’s nod to the commonly held principle that ought implies can: you can be morally bound to do only something that you are able to do. Therefore, moral qualities are not objective, in the sense that they “indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves” (ibid).Spinoza does not explicitly attempt to resolve this problem in the Ethics, though commentators have attempted to do so on his behalf in a variety of ways (Garrett 1990, 228–33). However, in at least one of Spinoza’s accounts of confusion, to say that an idea is confused is to say that it is partly determined by external causes (E2p29s). This limitation or determination is negation in the sense that each finite mode is not the whole attribute Extension; it is not the other finite modes. They take 'thought' to refer to the activity that is characteristic of minds, namely thinking, the exercise of mental power.